Learning to Work on My Husband's Truck

My husband spends a lot of time working on his custom 4x4 truck and I can go for a long time without seeing him. Lately, he has started teaching me some things about the truck so that I can get used to all its unusual operations. I get to exercise my mind while I do this. The bonus is spending some quality time with my husband.

This past week my husband finally got a winch that he has been wanting for a long time. Initially, he had some help mounting it from his best friend who was visiting from out of town. Once the friend left, there were still a few things to take care of and I helped with those. It was all very new to me. I know nothing about winching or winches.

The first thing we worked on was putting new blinkers on the front of the truck. My husband had removed the bumper so that he could mount the winch so he needed to install new blinkers to be legal. He started out by giving me some basics about electricity and giving me an understanding about the positive and negative connections. He also gave me a run down of the basics of how an electrical circuit works.

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To make the connections, I attempted to strip some wires, but I found that difficult to do. Putting the connector ends on took a bit of strength for me, but I did manage to do it. Crimping wires takes a lot of hand strength. Once we had everything put together, I mounted the blinkers to the front of the truck and connected it to the original connectors. We spliced the original wires and connectors to utilize the factory harness. Then we tested everything out and it worked.

The next project was connecting the winch to the battery in the truck. The battery was relocated to the bed of the truck behind the driver side. I needed to drill a hole to run the cable through the body. We put the cables together and connected it to the battery. I even did some soldering along the way when we put in a quick connect so that we can easily disconnect the battery from the winch. My husband said normally there would be a separate battery for the winch, but he bought a bigger deep cycle battery so that he could use just one.

Overall it was a good experience. These days I am all about learning all kinds of new things. I am thinking that next I want to learn about changing the oil in my truck.

Share your thoughts.

FaithfulHomesteader

3/28/2018 10:57:33 PM

In the past I probably would not have been so willing to do such things, but I have changed my outlook and I want to be more adventurous. Thanks for stopping by Nebraska Dave.

NebraskaDave

3/20/2018 9:23:22 AM

Faithful Homesteader, you are a true blue homesteader for sure. I couldn't get my wife near an open car hood or garden hoe. I loved her dearly but there were just some things she wouldn't do. Her favorite saying was my world is inside the house and yours is any thing outside the house. She was an amazing cook but didn't do any canning, freezing, or preserving. It was the only thing that she would let me do inside the house.
Have a great leaning new homesteading things day.
Nebraska Dave

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